Isabelle, largely left to herself, for occupation drove about the snowy hills, sometimes taking with her for company one of the convalescents or a nurse, often alone, liking the solitude of the winter spaces. Sometimes she went to the blacksmith's shop and talked with the old man, learning the genealogy and the sociology of the neighborhood. The text for Sol Short's wisdom was ever at hand in the passers-by. Ending one of his transcripts, he made a phrase that lingered in Isabelle's mind long afterward. "So she was left a charge upon the property," he said of an old woman that had come out of one of the village houses. "Aunt Mehitabel went with the house. When it was sold, she had to be taken over by the new owner, and her keep provided. And there she is now, an old woman in ill health and ill temper. I don't know as there is a worse combination."…
"I wonder why I stay," Isabelle said to Margaret after nearly two months had slipped by. "I am quite rested, as well as I shall ever be, I believe. You don't need me. Nobody does exactly! Molly writes me very contented little letters. Mother is staying with her, and she is at the party age, and would be terribly bored to come here, as you suggested. John is in St. Louis; he seems to have a good deal to do out there this winter. So you see my little world gets on perfectly without me."
"Better stay here, then," Margaret urged, "until spring. It will do you good. You haven't exhausted the doctor yet!"
"I almost never see him, and when he does remember me he chaffs me as if I were a silly child. No, I think I will go next week."
But she did not wish to leave. The winter peace of the little village had been like an enveloping anodyne to her weary body and mind. Removed from all her past, from the sights and the people that suggested those obsessing thoughts which had filled her waking hours with dreariness, she had sunk into the simple routine of Grosvenor as the tired body sinks into a soft bed. The daily sight of the snowy fields, the frozen hillsides black with forests, and the dry spirituous air, lifted her. Now and then the effect of the anodyne wore off and the old gnawing pain, or a sodden sense of futility, overwhelmed her afresh. "It will never get straight!" she said, thinking in the terms of Potts's specifics. "I am somehow wrong, and I must go all my life with this torture—or worse—until I die!" And the whole panorama of her little life would unroll before her in the sleepless hours of the still night: her girl ambitions, her mistaken marriage, her striving for experience, for life, to satisfy—what? Then her mistaken love, and Vickers's sacrifice, and the blackness afterwards,—the mistake of it all! "They'll be better without me,—mother and Molly and John! Let me die!" she cried. Then illogically she would think of Renault and wonder what he could do for her. But she shrank from baring herself before his piercing gaze. "He would say I was a fool, and he would be right!"
So she went out into the cold country and walked miles over the frozen fields through the still woods, trying to forget, only to return still ridden by her thoughts,—bitter tears for Vickers, sometimes almost reproach for his act. "If he had let me plunge to my fate, it would have been better than this! I might never have known my mistake,—it would have been different, all of it different. Now there is nothing!" And at the end of one of these black moods she resolved to return to her world and "go through the motions as others do. What else? Perhaps it will be better when I am distracted. Potts will give me something to brace me."…
But Isabelle did not return to the city and get that prescription from the great Potts.
CHAPTER LIX
Just as Isabelle had completed her packing on Sunday afternoon, a message came to her from Dr. Renault through Margaret. "We need another woman,—two of our nurses have been called away and a third is sick. Will you give us some help?"
"I am going up myself for the night," Margaret added. "They are badly pushed,—six new cases the last three days."